If Time Allows Us
by sakuratyan
Summary: The kids made it this far in the game. The end of the Reckoning was almost upon them. They dealt with weird time shenanigans and death several times. Will they be able to fulfill their plans? /REWRITTEN/
1. Recap

**A/N:** This is sort of like, a mixture of canon stuff and a bit of what I think could inevitably happen. Most likely, the chapters won't make sense in the chapter because I'm writing it before AH makes the latest updates. Most likely, I'd be getting a lot of this stuff wrong. But it's never not-fun to have some imagination and share it! :D Hopefully I didn't get it too far than from what's in the Homestuck timeline… that thing is just fucking complicated but not so complicated that it's not interesting.

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><p><em><strong>If Time Allows Us…<strong>_

Recap

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><p>April wasn't such a great month for the kids.<p>

It was where they learned truth behind their pasts. It was the month when they faced death several times. It was the month of being trolled and eventually making friends with said trolls. It was when their dream selves woke up. It was that very April that brought on the end of the world, and that created four other planets for them to explore.

On John Egbert's thirteenth birthday, he received the beta for a new computer game called Sburb. And after spending a while trying to find a person to play the game with, John's gift was the answer to his dear friend Rose Lalonde's desperate pleas. Becoming his "server player", she learned that she could manipulate the world around her friend.

After accidentally opening the Cruxtruder device deployed next to his front door, a rather ominous countdown began. While the time went by, Rose decided to prototype a Kernelsprite that was released from the Cruxtruder with a Harlequin doll in his living room. John used a carved cruxite dowel to create a cruxite apple, his artifact. Not too long after, he took a bite of the apple while the sprite shook in angst.

At 0:00, a meteor struck John's house. And at 0:00, John and his house were transported within the Inciphisphere.

Defeating imps and earning grist, John and Rose built up to his first gate—creating new items to help him on his quest along the way. After passing through aforementioned gate, John was then transported to a land beneath his house. "To ascend, you must first descend!" To the Land of Wind and Shade he was whisked off to (but perhaps he was there all along?).

With time, Rose and two other friends—renowned cool kid of the group Dave Strider and enthusiastic (and somewhat psychic) narcoleptic Jade Harley—were sent into the game. Once becoming the "server client", the remaining three entered the Land of Light and Rain, the Land of Heat and Clockwork, and the Land of Frost and Frogs, respectively.

In between the chaos of defeating imps, creating cool new things with the Alchemiter, sleeping and waking up on dream planets Prospit and Derse respectively, hearing the voices of exiles and heeding their words, and discovering the secrets of the game they were all taking part of, a species referred to as trolls from an alternate universe and planet cleverly named Alternia began helping (and hopelessly trolling) the kids on their quest. The few trolls that bothered to mess with the four have eventually developed what was known as "the human emotion/the troll disease called friendship". The other trolls that have not formally introduced themselves to the Earthlings either built up or destroyed their own relationships within their own kind. Of course, that should not be brought into detail, as troll romance was quite complicated.

Eventually, the children learned of their roles as Heir of Breath, Seer of Light, Knight of Time, and Witch of Space. They undertook personal journeys and came to terms with their relationships with their guardians. They traveled through memories after Prospit and Derse were destroyed.

And in time, they hoped, they would all reach Skaia, destroy the nefarious archagent known as Jack Noir, and work to create the Scratch that would reset their entire game session.

_That is, if time would allow them._

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><p>another nice AN: Okay, I'll probably edit this later on and I think I got some info wrong, but this is just a recap of like, the basic stuff. So please help me if you find something wrong and you'd like to see it corrected!_  
><em>


	2. The Plan

**A/N**: Wow, this chapter is a lot more of taking stuff from the canon script and adding my own commentary once in a while, but it'll get better soon. This sucks.

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><p><em><strong>If Time Allows Us…<strong>_

The Plan

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><p>"So you remember what happened?" asked Rose curiously.<p>

The other Derse dreamer nodded his head, albeit still being confused. With that, he shook his head furiously, trying to even remotely remember what he just described to his biological sister. Wait, why did it even matter what he did? It isn't like she was able to see him anyway. Or maybe she did… God, why does all this Sburb stuff have to be complicated? "Hold up," he started agitatedly. "You knock me out with that goddamn ball of yarn, steal the suicide mission, and blow up the sun." He waited for a response. "Oh, and since you're not dead, you probably could've reached God Tier like John."

"No, I told you that that was impossible."

"Right," Dave responded. "I can't keep track of all this crazy crap you throw at me, sorry."

The cool kid ran through the situation in his head. He was dead. So was Rose. They were revived to their dream selves: him by Jade, and her by John. God, it was like that troll Karkat's shitty shipping grid was coming true. But that was a completely different thought. Anyway, he followed in the footsteps of his future self to fight Jack and ended up dead. Only, he knew he was going to die and refrained from telling Jade that he would get shot and that she would have to start a nice corpsesmooch! session to revive him on Derse. Rose made lame attempts to communicate on a better level with him rather than using her Flight Broad Powers to stay the smart bookworm of the group. He never really wanted to be the Knight of Time, and now he couldn't really go back in time to fix anything anymore. Dave broke a sword like it was the thing he was the best at doing, sliced the chain connecting the moon to its dream planet, and prepared to fly that shit out to blow up the sun. Then he got struck with a ball of yarn.

Oh, god, who gets knocked out by something as soft and fuzzy and harmless as a ball of yarn? Dave Strider, that's who.

"This game is sorta starting to suck," he confided. "And it doesn't even make sense."

Rose straightened and raised an eyebrow, as if Dave could actually see her and what she did at the moment. "Why do you say that?" she asked, ready for some psychoanalysis.

He rested his head on his palm and sighed, a very un-cool thing to do in his opinion. "Are you really that dense, Rose?" he asked. "We're all dead in one way or another. John died to reach God Tier Status, Jade's dream self exploded, and they had to make out with our dead bodies just so we could be alive here. Our guardians are dead except for that psycho-dog Bec."

"That's sort of ironic," pointed out the flighty broad.

He rolled his eyes. "Yeah, sure."

_Somewhere in the past, but not too far…_

Admittedly, the troll he was the most comfortable with talking to was also one of the biggest jerks he'd never met. Not that he never denied that he was an asshole, but still…

"Hey," greeted Karkat with his little troll typing quirk.

As they got through discussing the spider troll Vriska, they began going over important information. Plans.

Well, almost immediately for Karkat and his handy Trollian timeline. But it was one long, windy journey for John to endure. Granted that it was fun, the jerk still decided to be an ass and blow off John's excited feelings. Maybe he would have been nicer about it if he actually got the chance to fly like the other eleven in his session. "Egbert, goddamnit," he typed angrily, "will you shut your mouth and listen?"

"Ok, but is something wrong?" asked John worriedly.

"Yeah, something is wrong," began Karkat. "Or, was. The end. I don't really want to talk about it."

"Oh, are you sure?"

Karkat rolled his eyes at the screen in front of him. "Yes, and not just because, oh, the clock is rapidly ticking down to something we're calling the critical moment, and no, I don't know what that is, so close your reeking question geyser before it asks." His usual typing style (toned down because, well, who would want to really read these troll quirks all the time?) made it seem like he was yelling. And gosh darn it, he could have very well been yelling had it not been for John being on a different session and reading his messages like it was in plain script.

John pouted. "But, I'm your friend. Aren't I?"

"Oh god." Wow, he really just pulled that card. Karkat's hands tensed up on his keyboard, but he still managed to generalize his situation. He just dealt with his best friend that went insane and he was definitely still emotional about the entire ordeal. "Let's drop it," he finally said, meaning that this was definitely the last time the topic would be brought up in the conversation.

After finally agreeing to let it go (although he couldn't deny that he still wanted to help his angry-at-the-world alien friend), he remembered something he had been dying to know. "Do you know if Rose is ok? Did it work?" His mind shifted to the moment after he finally found his dad and Rose's mom… and Bec Noir. It ended as a Strife battle which Ms. Rose Lalonde sadly lost, and a kiss planted on the Seer to revive her… hopefully. John never did quite get what was supposed to happen afterward, no one bothered to explain it to him.

"She's fine," Karkat began to explain. "She woke up alive on Derse."

"Really?"

"That's the rule, John. You kiss a dead player in time, and their dream self takes over, assuming they still have one." Karkat sighed deeply. "It's incredible you reached God Tier Status without even understanding the more mundane means of resurrection available. Wait, your unfailing cluelessness makes it the opposite of incredible, my mistake." He continued to make fun of John's apparent stupidity, reviving the fact that John was apparently "not a homosexual", whatever the hell that meant.

"Ok, shut up," he continued. "We were talking about something important. Rose, remember."

John nodded his head at the projected screen in front of him. "Yes," he said in response.

She is waiting on Derse for your bomb to be delivered. It will arrive safely, a little later."

"Oh, great!" John replied almost ecstatically. "How do you know it gets there?"

"Jade told me. Jade from further ahead on your timeline." That was really all that Karkat needed to say for John to explain. The Trollian nonsense and timelines were confusing, but it wasn't like the four kids weren't used to that sort of stuff already. He didn't have to hear about how Kar and Jade were making plans, talking along her entire timeline until The Scratch starts.

Although, he could have probably done without hearing that weird speech about how to breed frogs and how Jade and Dave definitely did a lot of that. Not that it was in any way wrong, but it just sounded so weird. It wasn't exactly normal to hear about two of your best buddies breeding frogs by exploiting time travel. But then again, what was normal to them nowadays?

"She and Dave ran into Jack, which I'm sure he must have saw coming because I've never seen anyone exploit time travel so shamelessly as him, not even Aradia."

"Aradia?" asked John curiously with a cocked head.

Karkat rolled his eyes for about the hundredth time since he began talking to the humans. "Just another dead troll, who cares." John frowned, expressed by a ':('. "Stop frowning," he typed, "She was already dead before she died."

Confusing as that was, it still would probably make any human feel a bit down.

"So," the grumpy troll continued, "she and Dave fought with him a while, and long story short, he died."

John pulled back in shock. "What?"

"… but it's fine, I guess that was his plan, like some bizarre useless last stand, even if he didn't tell Jade who was pretty freaked out until I talked her through it."

The human ectobiologist paused for a moment. "Did she kiss him too?"

Karkat assured him that she did (while Jack was watching like some sort of weird creep) and that it worked. He explained that he did, indeed, wake up alive on the Dark Planet and met with Rose. But he just couldn't see past that part in his timeline. Dave doesn't time travel after that, but he stays with Rose on Derse waiting for John to start The Scratch. And either Dave or Rose would deliver the bomb that would detonate against the sun.

John wasn't all that reassured at hearing that his friends were going on a suicide mission. They had no dream selves left! Once they died on Derse, that was it! "Couldn't I do it?" he asked in concern. "I am apparently immortal, because of this God Tier business, so the bomb probably would not kill me!"

No, because that would count as a heroic death. And a heroic death was one of the two ways that a person in God Tier Status could die.

"I just don't want to lose anybody else is all," he choked out.

"That's just how it is," Karkat began. "I've lost friends for way more pointless reasons. You're all out of options here. You'd be risking death just as much as they would, and they're better qualified to handle the mission as the Derse dreamers. Jade's dream self is dead too, so she's out." He continued to enlighten Egbert on Jade's self-prototyping and how she thought her sprite was selfish and hysterical and represents the parts of Jade that she hates about herself. "I've tried to tell her that her sprite self is possibly nowhere near as despicable as she's making out with herself to be."

He paused for a moment. "I mean making herself out to be. Oh, god, you know what I mean."

Screw it, that little Freudian slip didn't matter as much and it definitely wasn't as if John hadn't said anything even remotely stupid before. "Look, I'm just saying we've all got flaws, even her. And for all the shit she's given me on this very subject, she keeps herself dangling from a very high hook. She'd be doing me a major personal solid by making at least some attempt to get herself off. Wait... fuck. What did I just say..."

"Wow," was John's only actual response.

"I meant let herself off." The young troll paused again. "The hook, the fucking goddamn hook... It's a figure of goddamn speech."

John raised his eyebrows.

"Put those back down, before my hot acid ragebreath burns them off your idiotic face."

"Ok, I am putting them back down as not suggestively as possible," John joked.

What were they even talking about? Oh god. It definitely wasn't whatever this is. Shit, whatever.

They continued to discuss the plan and the up and coming "shenanigans", along with a bunch of useless crap that didn't belong in a serious conversation. How John couldn't go out there and protect Jade because being killed in that way would count as a heroic death and thus give him the stupidest and possibly shortest lifespan of any immortal, and that Jade wouldn't need the protection anyway; Jack wouldn't harm her at all because of that little bit of loyalty he felt as part of her former guardian. How, sadly, he wouldn't hold that sort of loyalty and respect toward any other player, but that it wouldn't matter after their plans for critical moment take place.

And hopefully, if they managed to preserve themselves and escape, everyone (that was still alive) would be able to meet up and live the rest of their lives as if they didn't just nearly escape a doomed fate.

"Get prepared," said Karkat. "Make all the equipment you think you'll need, stay out of trouble. Wait for Jade to send that code, wait for me to contact you for the first time, and do your best to humor him while he ignorantly attempts to flame you back into the puddle of slime you crawled out of." His hands paused for a moment over his keyboard. Well, it wouldn't really kill him to say it. "Please."

John smiled enthusiastically. "Oh man. Our first conversation ever? I can't wait!"

"Yeah, but can I just say something in my defense before that happens?" the alien troll asked awkwardly. John nodded his head, knowing that his friend could see him through the viewport on that weird program he used. "I don't actually hate you, and I never did. I was deluding myself... Deep down, I'm sure I was always pretty okay with you."

"Wow, thanks Karkat!"

"It wasn't a fucking compliment," he typed back almost angrily (although it was always hard to tell when Karkat was stuck in an eternal capslock and ALWAYS MADE THINGS OUT TO BE MORE DRAMATIC THAN THEY ACTUALLY WERE).

Though that was out of the way, there was really one thing the kids were either not sure of, or in denial of. Did the Scratch really just hard reset the universe to a point before they entered the game? Would there even be an assurance of whether or not they would actually talk to each other? They would have absolutely no recollection of what happened in the time that they played the game. What if they didn't know each other, didn't play the game, and didn't create a new world?

Yes, there would be an alternate-universe Rose who would maybe talk to alternate-universe John. Unless they lived their lives exactly the same as before, which couldn't be said for sure, they would be leading different lives under different rules and with different friends. Perhaps even no friends at all.

Would not playing the game or talking to each other in that alternate universe create a rift in space-time and have them cease to exist since John would not be able to create them in the ectobiology lab?

It wasn't a doubt that the kids didn't think about this even once, but it was perhaps too complicated or disheartening to fully conceptualize. Of course they would have to talk and play the game together! Haha, how silly it was for them to even think about that! They wouldn't even exist if it weren't for the game! The game is the sole reason for everything in their lives! If their reliable omniscient source said nothing of that, then it's safe to assume that John would be John, Rose would be Rose, Dave would be Dave, Jade would be Jade, and they would all talk to each other and send each other gifts.

For their sakes, maybe it was better to stay hopeful and continue to think that everything would be like they planned it out to be.


End file.
